Chapter two of Notes of an Underground Humanist. Samra had been sitting with friends elsewhere. He raced to the building and frantically began to dig. He found his 5-year-old daughter, Sally, torn apart. Her torso and an arm lay separate from her legs. Another daughter, Noor, 8, was moving under the rubble. His granddaughter Lynn, not yet 2, had part of her face smashed. His wife, Alia Waabi, had died immediately. Still, the only option you can choose with a good conscience is the third.
Ehud Olmert is a monster. The problem with him and most people in power is that they are bureaucrats. Bureaucrats and technocrats. Like European monarchs in the 18th century, they see politics and war as gamesβextremely serious games, involving clever maneuvers for the sake of power and respect. One could draw parallels with chess. The world of these people really is nothing but a stage, and they are among the most dehumanized individuals on the planet.
But beautifully written, and a tour de force of investigative journalism. It enlightens you as to the human misery potentially embedded in the ground you walk on, the bricks in city buildings, stretches of de-forested land, seemingly placid rural hamlets. America truly was built on the backs of slaves, chattel-slaves and wage-slaves, convict-slaves, immigrant-slavesβcenturies of persecution, torture, forced labor, debt-slavery, human trafficking, genocide, imperial conquests, every horror imaginable.
In fact, it occurs to me that the U. It has fought dozens of wars in only two centuries. Its military is the most lethal killing-machine ever devised. The U. In general, the government pursues an unusually militaristic foreign policy.
It is complicit, moreover, in the crimes of the regimes it has supported, hundreds of authoritarian governments all over the world from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Domestically , the history of labor has been uniquely repressive and violent on the part of the ruling class.
